Daily Photo – New Edinburgh (Dunedin)

Ah, Dunedin. Or as the founders – a determined band of Free Church Scots envisioned it: New Edinburgh. Looking down at this photograph, you can’t help but feel a flicker of sympathy for the poor soul charged with turning that grand vision into reality: the surveyor Charles Kettle.

Kettle, bless his geometric heart, arrived with orders to impose the dignified symmetry of an old Scottish capital onto a landscape that clearly loathes straight lines. His solution, and the city’s most curious feature, was The Octagon.

You can spot it hunkered in the centre of the grid here, an eight-sided plaza embraced by the slightly larger eight-sided ring of Moray Place. The sheer Presbyterian grit required to stamp such perfect octagonal order onto a landscape of hills and winding gullies is frankly heroic. Kettle wanted something “Romantic”, but what he achieved was a street plan so ambitious (and so steep – I’m looking at you, Baldwin Street, officially the world’s steepest!) that the horse-drawn traffic of the 1800s must have been perpetually on the brink of despair.

It is, in short, a glorious, muddled masterpiece, a city born from a meticulous Scottish dream and then cheerfully wrestled into being by New Zealand’s uncooperative geology. The result? A town centre that is as memorable as it is magnificently improbable.